Influecning Privacy On Social Network Sites: How Contextual Cues And Surveillance Primes Affect Disclosure Behavior And Privacy Setting Descisions

Abstract

Nissenbaum's (2010) framework of contextual integrity contends that informational norms, which are characterized by key parameters or cues, indicate if a disclosure is appropriate to share in a given context. These cues include aspects of the context, relationship between interaction partners, attributes of the information being shared, and constraints on how information can be shared. Offline, these cues are relatively easy to identify, and help people locate and follow informational norms in their day-to-day lives. However, SNSs tend to obscure many of these cues, making it difficult for users to follow relevant informational norms on these sites. This study explored two factors that may affect participants' ability to abide by informational norms in SNS contexts. The first factor is a form of contextual cue that indicated how frequently other users had shared information on the site. The second factor is a class of primes called eye primes, in which the presence of eyes in one's visual field increases normative behavior in a wide range of settings (for review See Nettle et al., 2013). Study 1 explored what kinds of information students evaluate as appropriate versus inappropriate to disclose on a university-affiliated SNS to get a baseline understanding of the informational norms students would apply to a specific kinds of SNS. Study 2 examined how contextual cues and eye primes affected disclosure behavior and found that the contextual cues affected disclosure behavior relative to when there were no cues present, but the eye primes only affected disclosure behavior when contextual cues were also present in this context. Study 3 INFLUENCING PRIVACY explored how contextual cues and eye primes affect privacy setting decisions, and found that contextual cues affected how strict participants set their privacy settings. In addition, placing the privacy settings page before the profile page nudged participants to disclose more inappropriate information than when they filled out a profile before making privacy setting decisions. The results of these three studies suggest that contextual cues and eye primes can affect information sharing behavior on SNSs. This not only has important implications for Nissenbaum's (2010) framework of contextual integrity but also has interesting implications for Brandimarte and colleagues (2013) privacy paradox as well.